Abstract: We move with the metaphors of motion, from the speed of data traffic to the journey of life. The truth is that we never really go very far, even when we travel. The illusion of mobility is fundamental to my practice of cyberformance, as is the conscious acknowledgment that it is an illusion. The only thing that really moves is time and the greatest illusion is that for the duration of the performance we can suspend even time. While time takes a break, we are transported across the huge gulfs that separate our individual lives to the shared imaginative world of the performance. Later, when we’ve returned to reality, we might say it was a moving experience; then we’ll move on to the next thing, returning perhaps to an echo lurking in our memories.
Résumé : Nous nous déplaçons avec les métaphores du mouvement, par la vitesse du traffic data jusqu’au parcours de la vie. La vérité est que nous n’allons jamais très loin, même lorsque nous voyageons. L’illusion de la mobilité est fondamentale quant à ma pratique de la cyber-performance, comme l’est la reconnaissance consciente même que c’est une illusion. La seule chose qui bouge vraiment est le temps et la meilleure illusion est que pendant la durée de la performance, même le temps peut être suspendu. Pendant que le temps est arrêté, nous sommes transportés à travers les immenses fossés qui séparent nos vies d’individus à l’imagination partagée du monde de la performance. Ce n’est que plus tard lorsque nous retournerons à la réalité, que nous dirons peut-être que ce fût une expérience émouvante; et là, nous passerons à d’autre chose, revenant peut-être à un écho enfoui dans nos souvenirs.
In my practice as a cyberformance artist, time and movement are not the same as they are in the “real” world. Time stretches across the globe, becoming all times at once and no time at all; we search for a “new intuitive time zone” (NITZ) as we juggle days and nights. Movement is simultaneously reduced – concentrated into a digital dance at the keyboard and the subtle rearrangement of bits and bytes – and magnified – as my actions appear on screens around the world, causing ripples of response thousands of kilometres away.
How then to speak of suspended mobility in cyberspace? It’s both natural and nonsensical; always-already and impossible; ontological and paradoxical. In cyberspace, wild contradictions are often utterly logical. Perhaps this is because while our ethereal identities freely roam a timeless datasphere, our flesh and blood is always firmly rooted in a very different reality.
And so I offer these ten(tative) steps towards an understanding of suspended mobility in cyberspace.
I
When I think about suspended mobility, the image that won’t leave my mind is from my childhood. I’m six or seven years old; Dad comes home from work my sister and brother and I jostle around him, clamouring for a turn at “standing running”. It goes like this: Dad stands, legs apart, and holds one of us round the waist, legs dangling; the suspended child runs as fast as possible, limbs flailing wildly in the air, struggling in vain to escape and laughing like a lunatic. We love this absurd game of “standing running”. As well as the literal image of suspended mobility, I still carry with me my childish delight in the struggle to achieve the impossible – a most useful trait when tinkering with the tricky technology of the internet.
II
I’m suspended somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, or the Gobi Desert, or the Atlantic, restrained in my seat and compressed with a few hundred other humans also buckled in, (s)trapped together inside a steel prison, immobile yet hurtling through the atmosphere at the fastest speed we’ll ever experience, wiggling our toes and hoping we won’t get deep vein thrombosis. It’s in this privileged liminal space that I feel the most free. With few distractions my mind races like crazy across the terrain of What-if and Maybe, ranting a monologue in my journal. I gain and lose days, go backwards in time, eat strange food and disembark in an airport that looks suspiciously similar to the one I left hours ago. Do you ever spot continuity errors at the airport, when someone forgets to change a piece of the set or uses the wrong avatar, and you glimpse a little bit of India in Scotland? And have you ever noticed how the other passengers change en route from being, for example, all British when you boarded in London to being all Serbian by the time you land in Belgrade? What happens to us when we are suspended up there?
III
I’m standing in the centre of the stage with my laptop balanced on my head; it will take exactly ten steps to reach the table where I’m going to put it down. I slowly turn to begin the walk, and everyone in the theatre holds their breath for my ten careful steps. One foot follows the other through the extended moment of suspense, nothing else moves. In the stillness, the focus is so intense that I seem to float across the stage. The laptop rocks gently with each floaty step. If it falls, that will be the end of the show – this is not a prop! It doesn’t fall. I reach the table and sink down on one knee until the laptop is level with the table; the audience collectively exhales as I offload the laptop. A moment later I’m connected and a face appears on the screen from thousands of miles away. We are lovers separated, swimming towards each other, reaching across oceans, through cyberspace; geography warps, time folds in on itself – and we touch.
IV
Friday night, 9pm: I’m sitting at my laptop in New Zealand with a glass of wine, teaching a workshop at a women’s computer festival in Linz, Austria. Or: I’m sitting in bed in Brisbane at 7am drinking coffee and watching a live performance by artists in Europe. Or: I’m in a deserted art gallery in a virtual world, marvelling at how my avatar has completely deconstructed after sitting in a special chair. Or: we interrupt a rehearsal to project a live UpStage performance from Montreal onto the wall of the studio. I’m everywhere and nowhere, juggling time zones and continent-hopping on a daily basis. If I think about it too much it’s exhausting but most of the time it’s exhilarating.
V
Nobody here speaks English. I move around the festival encased in a bubble of other people’s stale cigarette smoke and fragmented Frenglerbiski eaves-droppings that I catch on a piece of paper and laugh about later. Time balloons in and out grotesquely instead of obediently marching forwards, then abandons us completely. I realise that it’s inevitable, neizbezno je, surrender is the only response and so I do. A year later I return to find workmen digging up the centre of town in exactly the same place as before. My friends explain that last year the sewage pipes were replaced, this year it’s the telephone cables. I wonder what it will be next year – the electricity, I suppose. Meanwhile broken bridges still sag into the river, solid reminders of an unreal episode that many people believed could never happen there. They were proved wrong.
VI
We’re in the middle of a rehearsal and I’ve got lag; my fellow players carry on without me, perhaps not even aware that I’m frozen. I’m typing frantically – frustratedly waving from my end of the connection, but in vain – it’s as if I’m contained within a glass cage and nobody can see or hear me calling out to them. It feels like an eternity but it’s probably only a few seconds before the lag suddenly breaks and everything I’ve been typing spews onto the screen in a flood of speech and text. Oh, someone says, I thought you’d gone quiet … and we continue. Lag happens, even on the fastest broadband connection. It’s unpredictable but inevitable, and key to the liveness of cyberformance. When there’s no lag, people have trouble believing it’s live. Moments of lag allow the audience into the reality of live performance. There’s a shared nervous anticipation, the risk of failure, the possibility of disaster; and a shared sense of relief and survival when the lag breaks and disaster is averted.
VII
In a “rogue” state in some half-forgotten corner of the globe, thousands of people put their regular lives on hold, pack their secrets into small parcels and set off in a slow silent march to an unknown destination, walking through the night and hiding during the day. Everything stops except the impulse to move on, to survive. Later I watch their progress on television, and read about it in newspapers that turn their desperation into headlines that sell. The people gaze out at me from an anonymous tent city where they wait for lawyers and politicians to make decisions that will determine the next steps they take; temporary residency? or deportation? Until then, they wait. It might be days, weeks, months, years. I try to imagine what that would be like, the waiting, but even my best efforts at empathy can’t shake the underlying conviction that I’ll never be in that situation myself. And I wonder if one day I’ll be proved wrong.
VII
We’re so excited we’ve got a residency! For the first time ever, the four of us will be in the same room together, the first time that some of us will actually meet in “real” life. We’re so excited that when Karla and Leena finally can’t raise the money for their airfares, we refuse to accept that they’re not coming. We set up a blog and they post about their preparations and their journeys from the other side of the world. They get jet-lag and culture-shock and they stumble up against the obstacles of the local environment. A series of natural and unnatural disasters prevent them from joining Vicki and I at the residency, which is a two-week group residency with 25 artists from New Zealand and overseas. The other artists accept our explanations for Karla and Leena’s invisibility, and share in our insistence that they are here, our faith that they will show up. They always do. And of course they do appear at the last minute – texting from Immigration as they’re about to be deported, trading Finnish vodka for ten minutes online to appear in our final presentation. They were there, You can ask anyone.
IX
The surgeon wears white gumboots like an abatoir worker; apparently I joke with him as I’m wheeled out of the operating theatre, but my memories begin moments later when I’m suddenly wide awake, numb from the waist down and high as a kite – feeling great! Then the morphine wears off and I begin to appreciate the incursion that my body has endured. Later, after bed-rest, physio, walking with crutches then a stick, the gym, the swimming pool – much later I hold my femoral head in my hand and contemplate this externalised piece of my skeleton, this first little death. Later still, I get used to setting off airport metal detectors, and accept with some disappointment the smallness of the new scar. I have my mobility back!
X
I am perfectly still apart from my fingers, which dance dexterously across the keyboard, each keystroke contributing to the shape of a performance that’s being watched around the world. I have to be physically fit to do this – swimming, tai chi, yoga, warming up my fingers and wrists like a concert pianist – it all helps to avoid repetitive strain injuries, bad posture, cramps, stiff neck. Cyberformance is physically demanding. I jump from one application to another – performing in UpStage then chatting back-stage via Skype, referring to the script in a text editor, adjusting my web cam in Oculus and remembering to check my email for SOS calls from lost audience members. During rehearsals it’s even more intense as I’m also surfing the web for material, whipping up a new avatar in a graphics application, downloading images from my camera and getting text messages from someone who’s running late… All of this activity is concentrated in and around my laptop, lines of energy buzzing between my fingers, eyes and ears. My body is the still centre of a data whirlwind.
In the suspended mobility of cyberformance, now is all there is and here is cyberspace.
And yet it is not, it is not that at all.
Photos by/par Suzon Fuks
Biography
Helen Varley Jamieson is a writer, theatre practitioner and digital artist from New Zealand. She is currently undertaking a Master of Arts (research) investigating her practice of cyberformance at Queensland University of Technology. Since 2002 she has worked with the globally distributed cyberformance troupe Avatar Body Collision, devising and performing live performance using internet chat applications. The group began to develop their own purpose-built cyberformance software, UpStage, in 2003, and the second version was recently celebrated with 070707, a festival of performances in UpStage. Helen is a trustee of the Magdalena Aotearoa Trust and the web queen of the Magdalena Project, an international network of women in contemporary theatre.
www.creative-catalyst.com
www.avatarbodycollision.org
www.upstage.org.nz
